Theoretically, electric cars can easily be charged via house sockets – but this should only happen in an emergency. 

After all, e-cars need a lot of electricity. For example, if you want to charge a medium-sized 40-kWh battery, it takes about 17 hours on a normal socket – most house wiring is not designed for such a long-term current load. And in the worst case, overloading can lead to fires.

Charging at Home: The Wall Box

A professionally installed wall box is, therefore, a must. Not only because of the built-in safety devices, but also because it is simply more powerful: Models with 11 kilowatts are more than four times faster than a conventional socket. The charging time of a 40 kWh battery is thus reduced to less than four hours.

It is much faster at special quick charging stations: Premium models can charge with up to 250 kilowatts. A range of 100 kilometers can be “refueled” in less than five minutes. However, these fast-charging stations are still comparatively rare.

At the moment it looks like this: Around 85 percent of charging processes are currently taking place at home and at work, possibly also due to the poor expansion of the public charging infrastructure. The Electric Motorcycle batteries can be charged more fastly at home now.

Do We Actually Have Enough Electricity For E-cars?

If all 48 million cars were electric at once, the current power grid would quickly reach its limits – especially if many people were to charge their cars at the same time after work. However, network operators actually assume that around 13 million cars could already be driving electrically today.

However, if we are all to drive electrically in the foreseeable future, the expansion of the power grid must be initiated today – as must intelligent charging systems that communicate with each other.